Month: February 2012

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris.

How real can we and this world be if in a little while we all will be nothing but dust and ashes ?

Our plesance here is all vain glory,
This fals world is but transitory,
The flesche is brukle, the Feynd is slee;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

No stait in Erd here standis sicker;
As with the wynd wavis the wicker,
Wavis this wardlis vanitie;
Timor mortis conturbat me.

(William Dunbar c. 1460 — c. 1520, from "Lament for the Makers.")

Here lie I by the chancel door;
They put me here because I was poor.
The further in, the more you pay,
But here lie I as snug as they.

(Devon tombstone.)

Here lies Piron, a complete nullibiety,
Not even a Fellow of a Learned Society.

Alexis Piron, 1689-1773, "My Epitaph"

Why hoard your maidenhead? There'll not be found
A lad to love you, girl, under the ground.
Love's joys are for the quick; but when we're dead
It's dust and ashes, girl, will go to bed.

(Asclepiades, fl. 290 B.C., tr. R. A. Furness)

The world, perhaps, does not see that those who rightly engage in
philosophy study only death and dying. And, if this be true, it
would surely be strange for a man all through his life to desire
only death, and then, when death comes to him, to be vexed at it,
when it has been his study and his desire for so long.

Plato, Phaedo, St. 64, tr. F. J. Church

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread: What Sort of Petition?

One question that arises in connection with an attempt to distinguish superstition from genuine religion is the question whether petitionary prayer is superstitious.  The answer will depend not only on what we take superstition to be but also on the type of petitionary prayer.

In an earlier installment I suggested that there are three grades of prayer:

Grade I: The lowest grade is that of petitionary prayer for material benefits. One asks for mundane benefits whether for oneself, or, as in the case of intercessory prayer, for another. In its crassest forms it borders on idolatry and superstition. A skier who prays for snow, for example, makes of God a supplier of mundane benefits, as does the nimrod who prays to win the lottery.  Worse still is the one who prays for the death of a business rival.  Such prayer involves both  idolatry, the worshipping of a false god, and superstition.  A god reduced to the status of a cosmic sugardaddy is an idol.  It is the sort of god that atheists say does not exist.  I am pleased to agree with them.

Grade II: The next grade up is petitionary prayer for spiritual benefits. At this level one is not asking for one's daily physical bread, but for acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like  in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive  others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold  shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.

Grade III: Higher still, I should think, is prayer that is wholly non-petitionary. At this level one asks neither for material nor for  spiritual benefits. One form of this wholly non-petitionary  prayer is sheer gratitude for  what one has. Prayer as thanskgiving. Beyond this there is prayer as  pure aspiration, as a straining of the soul upwards. A pure spiritual  seeking, ascending, soaring. One seeks to elevate oneself above one's  perceived infirmity and wretchedness. One seeks to rise above the paltriness, crudity, baseness of one's usual thoughts and emotions.   Not a petitioning, but a self-elevating and a leaving of oneself   behind. Prayer as aspiration may then lead on to forms of meditation proper and perhaps infused contemplation. At the stage of meditation the soul enters mental silence and rests there having abandoned all  petitioning and aspiring. A"Waiting for God" to borrow a Simone Weil title.One is no longer working but resting in mental silence, listening. Within this silence one perhaps receives mystical grace which comes from without the mind.

Grade I, I would argue, has nothing to do with religion properly understood. But if I were to make this argument, I would run smack into the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse Grade I, petitionary prayer for material  benefits. The other five petitions are either clearly or arguably Grade II. The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural. To ask for   this bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive. For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without  'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the  soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

The Greek word translated as quotidianum in the Luke passage and as supersubstantialem in the Matthew passage is epiousios. I am not competent to discuss the philology of this Greek word, which may be a hapax legomenon. (Nor am I competent to assess the correctness of the two Wikipedia entries to which I have just linked; so Caveat lector!) But if any philologist or Biblical exegete were to tell me that epiousios cannot be understood in terms of 'supersubstantial,' (with the latter implying 'supernatural'), then I would say that that person is either wrong, or the text is corrupt, or the original sources do not record what Jesus actually said.

Philosophically, the fourth petition, if it is to fit with the others, and is not to represent a crass and infantile and quite absurd demand, must be interpreted spiritually, not physically. Otherwise, you play into the hands of the 'Dawkins Gang.' If it is physical bread you want, go to the store and buy some, or learn the art of the baker.

Would You Want Your Murderer Executed?

Excerpt:

Americans should be able to declare what they want the state to do on their behalf if they are murdered. Those who wish the state to keep their murderer alive for all of his natural years should wear, let us say, a green bracelet and/or place a green dot on their driver's license or license plate. And those who want their convicted murderer put to death can wear a red bracelet and/or have a red dot on their license.

An Example of a Religion Without Superstition

John Pepple has written an excellent post in which he sketches a religion free of superstitious elements, thereby showing that there is nothing in the nature of religion — assuming that religion has a nature — that requires that every religion be wholly or even in part superstitious.  Here is his sketch:

1. God exists.
2. Upon creating, God placed all sentient beings in heaven.
3. Some of us sinned and were sent to our universe for punishment.
4. There is no intervention by God in our universe, because that would interfere with the punishment.
5. After we die, we either regain heaven or are reincarnated.
6. We regain heaven not through worship of God but by good behavior, by treating other sentient beings right. In other words, we regain heaven by merit and not by grace.

As I suggested  in Religion and Superstition, the bare belief that there are supernatural beings is not superstitious.  Without essaying a logically impeccable definition of 'superstitious belief' (very difficult if not impossible), I would say that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of a belief's being superstitious is that it entail one or more erroneous beliefs about the causal structure of nature.  I have seen Catholic baseball players  make the sign of the cross before stepping up to the plate.  That bit of (disgusting) behavior is evidence of a superstitious belief:  clearly the gesture in question has no tendency to raise the probability of connecting with the ball.  Or consider the plastic dashboard Jesus that I mentioned before.    The belief that the presence of this hunk of plastic will ward off automotive mishap is superstitious, and a person who occurrently or dispositionally has many beliefs like this is a superstitious person.

But what if the person believes, not that the piece of plastic will protect him, but that the purely spiritual person represented will protect him by intervening in nature?  That too is arguably superstitious, though not as egreuiously superstitious as the first belief.  One might argue like this:

a. The physical domain is causally closed.
b. The belief that Jesus will intervene in the workings of nature should one, say, have a blow-out is an erroneous belief about the physical domain.
Ergo
c. The belief in question is superstitious.

To make things hard for the religionist  suppose we just assume the causal closure of the physical domain:  every event in the physical universe that has a cause has a physical cause, and every effect of a physical cause is a physical event.  The idea is that no causal influence can enter or exit the physical domain.  That the physical domain is causally closed is neither obvious nor a principle of physics.  It is a philosophical thesis with all the rights, privileges, and debilities pertaining thereunto.

But even if causal closure is true, it doesn't rule out the existence of a wholly immaterial God who sustains the universe at every instant but never intervenes in its law-governed workings.  As far as Pepple and I can see there is nothing superstitious in the belief that such a God exists.  So there is nothing supersitious about Pepple's (1).

I read his (2) as the claim that God creates purely spiritual beings who exist in a purely spiritual domain.  Please note that sentience does not entail having physical sense organs.  For example literal visual seeing does not require the existence of physical eyes. In out-of-body experiences, subjects typically have visual experiences that are not routed through the standard-issue optical transducers in their heads.  And yet they literally (and arguably veridically) see physical things, e.g., the little bald spot on the top of a surgeon's head. 

Ad (3).  How do we get sent into this penal colony of a world?  We are born into it: the preexistent soul begins to inhabit an animal organism.  Soul in this sense is of course not an Aristotleian animating principle or a Thomistic anima forma corporis, but a Platonic soul.  But wouldn't the attaching of a pre-existent soul to an already living organism involve some violation of causal closure?  Not obviously.  But this is a deep question. (I now invoke the blogospheric privilege entailed by the 'Brevity is the soul of blog.')

Pepple's is a rather 'thin' religion but I think it illustrates nicely how religion and superstition can be decoupled.  For his is a belief system that counts as a religion but is clearly not superstitious.

What we need to make this really clear are definitions of 'religion' and 'superstition' ('pseudo-religion').  But definitions in this area are very difficult to come by.  And it may be that religion and superstition are both family-resemblance concepts that are insusceptible of rigorous definition in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions of application.

Morning Star and Evening Star

London Ed of Beyond Necessity does a good job patiently explaining the 'morning star' – 'evening star' example to one of his uncomprehending readers.  But I don't think Ed gets it exactly right.  I quibble with the following:

Summarising:
(1) The sentence “the morning star is the evening star” has informational content.
(2) The sentence “the morning star is the morning star” does not have informational content.
(3) Therefore, the term “the morning star” does not have the same informational content as “the evening star”.

One quibble is this.  Granted, the two sentences differ in cognitive value, Erkenntniswert.  (See "On Sense and Reference" first paragraph.) The one sentence expresses a truth of logic, and thus a truth knowable a priori.  The other sentence expresses a factual truth of astronomy, one knowable only a posteriori.  But note  that Frege says that they differ in cognitive value, not that the one has it while the other doesn't.  Ed says that the one has it while the other doesn't — assuming Ed is using 'informational content' to translate Erkenntniswert.  There is some annoying slippage here.

More importantly, I don't see how cognitive value/informational content can be had by such subsentential items as 'morning star' and 'evening star.'  Thus I question the validity of the inference from (1) & (2) to (3). Neither term gives us any information.  So it cannot be that they differ in the information they give.  Nor can they be contrasted in point of giving or not giving information.  Information is conveyable only by sentences or propositions.

I say this:  neither of the names Morgenstern (Phosphorus) or Abendstern (Hesperus) have cognitive value or informational content.  (The same holds, I think, if they are not proper names but definite descriptions.)  Only indicative sentences (Saetze) and the propositions (Gedanken) they express have such value or content.  As I see it, for Frege, names have sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung), and they may conjure up  subjective ideas (Vorstellungen) in the minds of their  users.  But no name has cognitive value.  Sentences and propositions, however, have sense, reference, and cognitive value.  Interestingly, concept-words (Begriffswoerter)  or predicates also have sense and reference, but no cognitive value.

I also think Ed misrepresents the Compositionality Principle.  Frege is committed to compositionality of sense (Sinn),  not compositionality of informational content/cognitive value.  So adding the C. P. to his premise set will not validate the  above inference.

Idle Talk

Time was when I felt superior to those who lose themselves for hours in idle talk,  the endless yap, yap, yap, about noth, noth, nothing.  But superior to that superiority is benign indifference to the idlers, an indifference so indifferent that it permits a bit of engagement with them, not condescendingly, but in acknowledgement of our common humanity.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Underplayed/Forgotten Oldies

I'll reckon you haven't heard one of these in a righteous spell:

Betty Everett, You're No Good, 1963.  More soulful than the 1975 Linda Ronstadt version.
The Ikettes, I'm Blue, 1962.
Lee Dorsey, Ya Ya, 1961.  Simplicity itself. Three chords. I-IV-V progression. No bridge.
Paul Anka, A Steel Guitar and a Glass of Wine, 1962.
Carole King, Crying in the Rain, 1963.  The earnest girl-feeling of young Carole makes it better than the Everly Bros.' more polished and better executed version.   
Don Gibson, Sea of a Heartbreak.  A crossover hit from 1961.  It's a crime for the oldies stations to ignore this great song.
Ketty Lester, Love Letters, 1961.  Gets some play, but not enough.

Should You Trust Wikipedia?

Ed of Beyond Necessity asked me my opinion of the following passage from the Wikipedia article, Destiny.

In daily language destiny and fate are synonymous, but with regards to 20th century philosophy the words gained inherently different meanings.

For Arthur Schopenhauer destiny was just a manifestation of the Will to Live. Will to Live is for him the main aspect of the living. The animal cannot be aware of the Will, but men can at least see life through its perspective, though it is the primary and basic desire. But this fact is a pure irrationality and then, for Schopenhauer, human desire is equally futile, illogical, directionless, and, by extension, so is all human action. Therefore, the Will to Live can be at the same time living fate and choice of overrunning the fate same, by means of the Art, of the Morality and of the Ascesis.

For Nietzsche destiny keeps the form of Amor fati (Love of Fate) through the important element of Nietzsche's philosophy, the "will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), the basis of human behavior, influenced by the Will to Live of Schopenhauer. But this concept may have even other senses, although he, in various places, saw the will to power as a strong element for adaptation or survival in a better way.[3] In its later forms Nietzsche's concept of the will to power applies to all living things, suggesting that adaptation and the struggle to survive is a secondary drive in the evolution of animals, less important than the desire to expand one’s power. Nietzsche eventually took this concept further still, and transformed the idea of matter as centers of force into matter as centers of will to power as mankind’s destiny to face with amor fati.

The expression Amor fati is used repeatedly by Nietzsche as acceptation-choice of the fate, but in such way it becomes even another thing, precisely a “choice” destiny.

Ed tells me that the above strikes him as "gibberish."  Well, if not pure gibberish, then very, very  bad.  First of all, the writing is awkward and inept and in places incoherent. 

In the first sentence the author mentions 20th century philosophy and then immediately goes on to speak of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, both 19th century thinkers.  Could the author be so clueless as not to know when these gentlemen lived and wrote?

"Will to Live is the main aspect of the living."  Sentences like his are part of why I rejoice in no longer being a professor.  First of all, Will cannot be described as an aspect of anything: 'aspect'  suggests a view, an appearance, a representation (Vorstellung), a phenomenon.  Schopenhauer's Will, however, plays in his system the role that the thing-in-itself (Ding an sich)  plays in Kant's.  Will is noumenal, not phenomenal, and so cannot be coherently described as an aspect. One ought to have gathered this just from the title of Schopenhauer's magnum opus, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.  Second, Will is what everything is at bottom, not just living things.

I won't continue through the passage.  It is bad throughout.  What I hated about teaching was having to wade through garbage like this.  How does one explain to an incompetent writer what competent writing is?  It is like trying to explain to a nerd why his pocket protector is a sartorial outrage or why pulling your pants up too high is 'uncool' or why socks with sandals don't make it.  Or how do you explain to a socially lame person why she is socially lame?  What do you do? Give her rules to follow?  But such rules come too late.

I do not take as harsh a view of Wikipedia as Ed does.  There is much of value in its pages, and plenty of the material is arcana that cannot be found elsewhere.  But one cannot really trust anything one finds there since there is no way of knowing who wrote what and what his credentials are.

Let Caveat lector! be your watch-phrase, then, when you make use of this online resource.

Addendum:  Mark Anderson recommends The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia.